Monday 4 August 2014

Statistical player radars - 2013/14

21st century statistics!


As most of you will probably now know, I love a good statistic. Football is paying more and more heed to analysis of statistical data, and rightly so too - by clever analysis (and, obviously, application of context and football knowledge) it's possible to draw conclusions which simply aren't otherwise possible, and there are more and more managers using tools like ProZone in order to analyse their players.

A few months ago I posted "player radars" of Wilfried Bony compared to Olivier Giroud (link), a form of analysis I believe will be used more and more widely in the future. It's been championed/created by Ted Knutson, so I can't claim the credit, but I found a template online which allows you to make your own and so I thought it'd be interesting to have a look at some Swansea players to see how their radars looked. Without further ado...

These first two use a "defensive midfield" template - showing strengths and weaknesses in a central/defensive midfielder's game. It only really made sense to apply it to Leon and Canas... so that's what I did.

Leon Britton

Jose Canas

As you can see they are very similar, but Leon is more rounded and generally more impressive. No major surprises there, and given how we know Leon plays you can see these radars work at demonstrating a player's major strengths.

Now for...well, everyone in the Swansea team who I thought was worth running through the attacking midfielder/forward template. I didn't bother with Pozuelo (if there's an uproar I can always go back - in fact I'll probably end up doing it out of curiosity), but here are all the major movers and shakers for the Swans during 2013/14.

Wilfried Bony

Michu

 

 

Nathan Dyer

Wayne Routledge

Pablo Hernandez

Jonjo Shelvey

Jonathan De Guzman

Ki Sung-Yueng

As you can see, the similarities between Routledge and Dyer are obvious, while Pablo's ability to create (when fit) is actually quite remarkable. He managed seven assists in, essentially, fifteen matches (given the minutes he spent on the pitch), which is an absolutely ridiculous return! Such a shame he's so fragile. And slow. 

It's no surprise that Bony comes out of this a lot, lot better than Michu, so you can make your own conclusions there, but it's interesting to me that Jonjo Shelvey does so well out of this. Ki, for example, is obviously performing a very, very specific role when plays, while Jonjo is doing a bit more of everything. De Guzman looks a bit weak in comparison.

As the season progresses I'll use these radars as a point of reference, and I'll be able to use them to compare a player's performance last season with how they're doing this season.

Player radars. They're the future.

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